This specification relates to improving language-specific search results provided by a search engine.
Search engines accept query parameters including search words or phrases and return information identifying one or more results. Each result is a content item (e.g., a word processing document, a web page, a text file, an image, a multimedia file, or the like) that matches the query parameters. The content items are generally identified by searching an index of available items for ones that match the query parameters. In the case of an Internet search engine, the index covers a large number of content items, many of which are hypertext documents on the world wide web (the “web”). Information about the content items is collected from servers that host the content items in numerous countries and have content in many different languages.
A search engine can implement a number of strategies for ranking identified results. For example, a search engine user may specify a preferred language in which the user prefers identified results to be written. The user's preference can be specified explicitly, in a query parameter, for example, or in profile information provided by the user. Based on the preferred language, the ranking of identified results can be modified to return documents or other content items corresponding to the specified language.